While I love all the excitement and details of a wedding day, engagement sessions are unique in their own way. Not only is it intimate, it also gives couples a chance to showcase their personalities and stories through the location and outfits they choose. In this blog, I’m sharing a few tips on what to wear!

I believe that photos that make us happy are mostly because of how we feel at the time the photos were taken. I want everyone to feel their best before they even see me, so I give everyone a portrait guide before each session. Much of that gives some insight to help you decide what to wear. I recommend having two outfits, but some couples choose to wear one, either because they really like it or because they don’t want to take time out of the session to find a place to change. Here are a few tips to help you narrow down your options.

1. Dress comfortably.

You don’t want to remember your engagement session as the day you wore a top that was too tight or an itchy sweater. If it’s 100 degrees, try to wear something that’s won’t make you sweat more. If it’s 25 degrees (like in Katherine and Anthony's session, pictured above), make sure you have layers under your outfit and gloves to put on between photos. A scarf and a peacoat can be just as pretty as a sundress. Check out my Pinterest board for some of my favorite outfits for cold weather sessions!

Wear comfortable shoes! Take it from me: after I finished my graduation session, it was about a half mile walk back to my car. I really didn’t want to make the choice between wearing the shoes that hurt me for the whole session and walking barefoot. If you’re dying to wear a certain pair of shoes for your session, make sure you have a more comfortable pair to change into if you have a lot of walking to do. Here’s a tip that I picked up from my high school color guard days: carefully placed electrical tape on the insides of your shoes can save your feet a lot of pain.

2. Coordinate with each other.

You can coordinate outfits without matching, like the “red top, black pants” my cousins and I would wear for our family pictures at Christmas when we were little. You could choose a color scheme, such as wearing different shades of blue or both of you wearing something red and black. You could also complement each other’s outfits. If your favorite dress is purple and your fiancé doesn’t have anything purple, you can choose an accessory in a similar color to something he does have.

Matt’s blue shirt and red tie both complement the flowers in Amethyst’s dress. Her dress also was perfect for this April session and looked beautiful with the colors of Disney’s Polynesian resort! Which brings me to #3…

3. Consider the location.

You can coordinate your outfits with the color scheme of the location. If there are lots of fall leaves at this location, you could wear warmer hues to complement them. If your session is in the snow (which would be amazing), you could wear bolder colors to stand out. Tori and Michael’s first outfits complemented the colors of the desert garden so well, and their second outfits showed off their matching shoes while coordinating with the sunflowers.

If you’re newly engaged, I hope this helps you feel more confident going into your engagement session!

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Seeing your images for the first time is always such a fun experience, but deciding on what to do with the images can be difficult. You probably value being able to share them on social media or hanging your favorites in your home, but what else is there to consider? Here are some of the benefits of having digital files, prints, and albums.

Digital Files

When I was in middle or high school, a friend mentioned not having any baby pictures. I couldn’t understand why since my family had so many pictures of me from when I was little. His parents did take pictures of him when he was little, but his house had burned down when he was in elementary school, and any pictures that were in that house were gone. This was before digital photography became the norm, so any pictures they had that were taken before the fire were either copied from photos given to friends and family, or from the school’s database of school pictures.

This is the biggest reason why I never think twice about offering digital files. Another reason is that it’s always nice to be able to share your photos with so many friends and family members at once and to have them on your phone whenever you want to show someone, and you can get more prints if you need to years after I’ve given you the files. But only having digital files isn't ideal for every situation.

Prints

When I got engaged, my grandma, who was losing her memory, asked me every time we talked on the phone what my ring looked like. It was kind of hard to describe, so I texted a picture to my aunt, who I knew visited her often. Still, my grandma would ask me during every conversation what it looked like, insisting that my aunt had never shown her the photo, even though I knew she had several times. My grandma didn’t have access to a cell phone or a computer, so she couldn't see a digital file unless someone came and showed it to her, which we already knew wasn't working out. I printed off a photo and mailed it to her, along with some photos from our engagement session. That way, they could hang on the fridge she passed every day, and she wouldn’t forget what my ring looked like or whose ring it was.

So why would you want to order prints if you can just print the digital files yourself?

The short answer I give in my portrait guide is that I give you the option to order prints from a professional lab so that they’ll last longer over time and look closer to what you see on your screen. Plus, it’s easier than downloading the photos and re-uploading them to wherever you’re printing them.

As for lasting over time, I always think back to the section of the athletic hallway at my high school with all the photos of teams that won state titles. The color and clarity on some of these photos was pretty typical for the years printed on them—large, pixelated photos with overexposed faces from the 80s and 90s, and then smaller black and white photos from the 70s. Then there was an ivory-colored piece of paper in a frame, where you could see outlines of something if you got really close to it in good lighting. It was on a wall that faced away from the windows, presumably moved away from the sun a few years too late, but it was still there as a reminder that some team had won a state title sometime. I'm not sure that any teachers could tell us what the picture was, but I was sure that the team members would be upset if they came back to visit and the important picture of their winning team was all but gone from the wall

As for color, I went to Clemson. Sometimes, I would take photos of athletes and their uniforms would look orange and blue instead of orange and purple. Other times, the orange in their uniforms would look like Tennessee orange or Texas orange, or even red. I worked hard in my editing to make sure the colors in my photos looked like what I saw in person. Still, I soon realized that this didn’t always matter if I was printing from the least expensive print source I could get to, because the print could be more yellow or blurry than the file I sent. In college, I'd either pick up smaller prints from a pharmacy in a flimsy envelope, or the larger ones would be mailed to me in a cardboard tube. Not even millimeters separated my prints from whatever could be happening outside. What if a bigger package fell on it? What if I spilled something on the envelope on the drive home? Well, I can assure you that the prints that come from my galleries come from the same lab as the photos that hang on my walls. They came in thick boxes with tons of layers, and you can see that our wedding colors are CLEARLY purple and orange.

Albums

Let’s go back to my grandma: my dad made my grandma an album of family photos he had scanned, dating back to before my grandparents were married. He said that when he showed her the photos, she was suddenly able to recall specific details about the photos. Around that time, I made my sister's wedding album as her wedding gift, and my dad asked me to make another copy for my grandma. I sometimes had to describe my cousins' weddings to her, even though she was at all of them, and we wanted her to remember how happy she was at my sister's wedding. The album had pictures of the extended family, my sister’s accessories, and the sign they got with their names and wedding date on it. She could pick it up from her coffee table and remember what my sister’s new last name was, the date of the wedding, who was there, and what everything looked like. And someday, my sister and her husband won’t remember that day so well, and they’ll have the album to show their kids.

I decided to make my own wedding album because it’s something I like to do. And I did make it…a year after my wedding. It wouldn’t surprise me if other couples planned to make their own and just never did. Unless you’re like me and you’re obsessed with detail shots, you probably won’t have prints of your shoes and rings hanging on your wall, but you would want to have some photos in your album that highlighted some of the important items from your wedding day, like any heirlooms or the lace on your veil that you love so much. You wouldn’t hang pictures that included every guest, but you’d put some of them in an album so you can remember who was there. Plus, looking through my grandparents’ wedding album is so much fun because everything was so different back then, and it’s only when I look at those photos that my family and I see how much I look like my grandma.

My approach to delivering photos has always been to serve you the best I can without making things too complicated for you. Everyone has different photography needs, so hopefully this has helped you get a better idea of what your needs are. Thanks for reading!

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I always watch the forecast closely and frequently in the week prior to a session, and Katherine and Anthony's session was no different. Yet somehow, I woke up, saw that the forecast had changed from "cloudy" to "partly cloudy," then looked out the window to see the roads covered in snow! Nobody in the area was expecting this to happen. Luckily, it melted enough to clear the roads so I could meet Katherine and Anthony for the session. This would be the first session I'd ever done in the dead of winter and it would be in Virginia, so I knew this would be my coldest session yet. What I didn't know was exactly how cold it would be. Although the snow all melted before I could get a shot of Katherine's ring in the snow, it was still cold enough for us to take pictures in front of a frozen pond.

After meeting through their friends a few years earlier, Anthony proposed to Katherine in Washington DC on the steps of the Jefferson Memorial, which faces the Washington Monument. They wanted to have their engagement photos in the Virginia Blue Ridge Mountains, so in the week between Christmas and New Year's, we met up in Crozet, slightly west of where Katherine and I both grew up. Their outfits were the perfect winter engagement session outfits; the colors were so classically wintery, Katherine's red sweater was a perfect fit for that time between Christmas and New Year's Eve, and Katherine's mom made the scarves that both of them wore to the session. Katherine's yellow-gold ring was covered by her gloves for a good part of the session, but it made for some cute photos of her trying to keep Anthony's hands warm. We ended the session a little earlier than I usually do because the windchill was so brutal (by our Virginia standards), but the golden hour lighting kept us out for just a few more pictures.

I'm so glad we were able to brave the cold at least for a little while and that the snow didn't keep us from driving to these mountain views. Since apparently everyone else in Crozet decided to stay inside that day (not that we can blame them), we had this gorgeous landscape all to ourselves. It's always an honor to be part of putting these sweet moments into pictures, but it's even more special in the wide open with absolutely nobody else in sight. I can't wait to come back to Charlottesville for the next part of Katherine and Anthony's story!